This paper analyzes death as it is perceived and experienced in psychotherapeutic contexts: as a future possibility, as a loss of loved persons and as the near end as it happens with terminal patients. After a distinction between biological and psychological death, the hermeneutics of Heidegger, Sartre, Feifel and Krishnamurti are discussed. It is then suggested that death becomes more actual as a threat the less the individual profits from his existential possibilities.